No Fear
by Lizardlicks
Summary: Musings on the complex nature of a Human/Troll Kismesisitude. One shot.


In which Dave muses on the essence of a Kimesisitude (or, rather, I muse on it through Dave)

* * *

Dave remembered certain terror filled nights back on the meteor years ago: just after he learned that the psycho clown was using the ventilation system as a way to move around undetected. He'd been in the room he'd claimed as his personal space, lying on what passed for a bed and staring at the far wall as his mind wandered, when his gaze fell on the air duct's grate. Something caught the dim light of the room and glinted in the darkness beyond and he'd sat up abruptly, previous thoughts discarded for the sudden, nagging curiosity and the driving need to find something-_ anything_- new to entertain him on this desolate rock.

With in a few minutes, he'd managed to wrangle up something relatively stable to stand on, a recently alchemized chair, and had it shoved up against the wall. He'd worried about finding something to remove the grate itself, but when he was able to get up to and inspect it, he found that the bolts holding it to the wall were squared and raised enough to get a good grip with his fingers. He'd twisted and found them easier to turn than he expected as well- in hind sight, he would realized that his kismesis had probably planned that as part of his carefully orchestrated black seduction.

Just as the mentally deranged troll had carefully planned to set Lil' Cal against the grate in just the right way so that when Dave had pried it from the wall in one swift motion, the puppet pitched forward into his face, filling his vision with nothing but a too wide grin full of too many teeth and dead, glassy eyes. The shock of panic had sent him tumbling backwards off his improvised platform, landing with a star inducing crack to the back of his head and turning his back and shoulders into what felt like one giant bruise for days after.

Neither of those thing were anywhere near as bad as the cold dread that had seized his gut in a vice grip at the faint sound of honking that had come echoing back down the duct work to him.

Dave noted with an odd mix of smugness and apathy that the terror factor was all but gone, now. Oh, the chuckle fuck could still scare the wits out of him from time to time but it was never that raw, blind panic that left him a confused and vulnerable mess years ago on a rock hurtling blindly threw the blackness between universes. They'd been fighting and flirting and fucking for much too long for that now, they knew each other and the intricate, oily working of the others mind too intimately. They trusted each other.

That one was a real fucking sick twist. He trusted Gamzee farther than any of his childhood friends, even Egbert.

He supposed that was the Nature of the Beast called Kismesisitude, though. You wouldn't make your self so open and unguarded- left naked and exposed in both the literal and metaphorical sense- to someone you hated so completely unless you trusted them just as completely as well. When it came down to it, they'd seen the worst of each other. They'd seen terror and tears and rage and _lust_ etched onto the others face at one time or another, sometimes all at once. They'd bared open scars, emotional and physical, for the other to pick at and rend open and drink from. Caused quite a few of their own, too, some by design and others not. And through all of it, they'd built a weird, revolving cosmos of implicit faith in the other that the invisible line would never be crossed, a sacred and unspoken yet completely understood pact of loyalty through enmity.

When Dave stopped to think about it- which was, thankfully, not very often at all- the scale and weight of this... _thing_ they had built was so far out of his human comprehension that it bordered on becoming something Divine, and it left his mouth dry and his chest tight. He wondered if trolls could understand it better, kismesisitude being something natural to them and their way of life. Then again, sometimes on nights that were far too quiet, he would catch Gamzee watching him, studying him with eyes wide and wondering and a touch awed. It would vanish in a second, replaced by that trade marked, dopey, slightly unsettling grin when he caught Dave looking back and if ever asked what the troll was thinking about he would reply with anything from, "Absolutely, nothing, motherfucker," to something completely filthy or out right provocative and they'd be back into familiar territory as though never having strayed at all.

Dave supposed that there was still a very real danger of death in this liason. Gamzee was not the most stable of trolls, and trolls already being naturally vicious, bloodthirsty and slightly unstable to begin with, that was saying something. He'd struck a fine tuned balance for managing his dark urging voices of death and chaos, flitting between his moirail for assuagement and Dave for venting and, occasionally, roving purposefully into a bad part of town when he deemed it too much for either of them so he could set his shackled demons free on some pumped up bully with too many friends and guns and too little brains. Those last instances where, thankfully, few and far between, so long as he kept himself in easy access to the first two. But that meant that there was a chance, however small, that one day Gamzee would misjudge the darkness in his mind. That he would go to Dave, full of venom and rage and that the Knight, for as skilled and experienced as he was in strifing in general, and with Gamzee in particular, would be over come and destroyed.

It was a very real possibility, that he would never see it coming, either. He would smile and laugh and shake and die as Gamzee bore down on him, fingers clenched down on his throat, claws and teeth headless of supple, fragile flesh. The demons would erase The Line from exitance and he wouldn't know it had been crossed until it was far too late to hop over himself and give him a chance to come out alive.

And a very quiet but clear voice in his mind said that was just fine.

If it ever came down to that, if The Line was ever broken, there would be no point in trying to keep either of them alive, because the winner would come away irreversibly shattered inside. That made Dave feel a little sick to his stomach, with the grim understanding of a duty he hoped he would never have to do.

But there was still no fear.


End file.
